How to make a colouring book from your own photos

The best pages start with photos where you can see faces clearly. Before you choose, scroll back through your phone and look for these:

• Close-ups, where faces fill a good part of the frame.
• Daylight, or a bright room. Faces in dim light lose the detail that makes them look like themselves.
• A few people rather than a crowd. A whole wedding party makes a busy page with tiny faces.
• The daft ones: Grandad asleep, the dog's nose, the baby mid-yawn. They make some of the best pages.

Very dark, blurry or crowded photos make busier pages. Pets and places work as well as people: a cat in a box, the allotment, the beach you go back to every summer.

It costs little more than paper and ink, and it is a lovely thing to do with a grandchild. Here is the way through it:

1. Choose your photos and crop each one close, so the people or the pet fill the frame.
2. Turn each photo into lines. You can trace it: print the photo, tape thin paper over it against a bright window, and go round the main shapes with a fine pen. Or use a photo editing app with a sketch or outline filter, then tidy what it gives you.
3. Clean up each page. Take out background clutter and close any gaps in the lines, so every shape can be coloured.
4. Print on the thickest paper your printer takes, on one side only, so felt tips don't spoil the page behind.
5. Bind the pages. A ring binder works, or a print shop can wire-bind or comb-bind them for you.

The slow part is the faces. A line in the wrong place and it stops looking like them, so go carefully round eyes and mouths, and leave out lines you are not sure of.

You upload up to 20 photos, one for each page. We draw your first three pages from your own photos, free, before you pay anything, with no card and no account.

If you like them, you order. We draw the rest and email them for you to check, and you can swap a photo or ask for a redraw before anything is printed. A person checks every page beside its photo before it goes to the printer. How we make our pages explains the drawing.

Then your book is printed near you and posted tracked, with your own title on the cover. You can add a message on its own page at the front.

Up to 20, one for each page. A mix makes the best book: a few faces close up, a pet, a place you love, and one silly one. If you are short of good photos, ask the family. Someone always has the one from that Christmas.

£27.99 in the UK, with tracked delivery in the price. We deliver to the UK, the US (except Illinois), Canada (except Quebec), Australia and New Zealand, and each country sees the price in its own currency.

Before you pay, we show the date your book arrives by. The last order dates for Christmas in every country are on our delivery page.

Yes, if you are their parent or guardian or have their permission. We never sell your photos or use them in adverts, and only the services that make your order see them. We delete them 7 days after your preview if you don't order, and 30 days after delivery if you do. Your photos and privacy has the detail.

Then a ready-made book may suit you better. One Pen Pages are scenes you colour with one dark pen, and our guide to what a one-colour colouring book is explains how they work. Making a gift? See our colouring book gift guide for Mum or Nan.